You can't get a copy of Columbia School of Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann's profile of Hugh Hewitt on-line but if you can find a back issue lying around your summer cottage, it's well worth your time. First of all, there's a little cameo by our own contributing editor Chuck DeFeo who has been helping Hewitt with his on-line news and activism project Beyond the News.
Hewitt is the author of Blog -- perhaps the Bible of right-wing political activism these days -- and host of a popular conservative talk show based here in California. And, of course, he is well-known to PDF readers as a gracious and smart panelist at our Spring forum. You may not agree with him but boy, he sure is nice about it.
Lemann takes the standard Harvard-trained, Columbia-soaked establishment journalist's view of Hewitt and, of course, completely misses the point. His story is based on a refusal to acknowledge that the business of journalism has changed. So, next time you get all gooey-eyed about how the Internet is changing politics, it might be worth having a gander at these few paragraphs from Lemann (which are only on-line because I'm typing them from a printed copy of the magazine).
If Hewitt does write about me, he will surely ask me to reveal whom I voted for in the last Presidential election. I might as well get started with the transparency now. Although I do vote, I'm not to going to tell him. Like the house of the Lord, journalism has many mansions, and the one Hewitt inhabits is surely one of them. But in another of the mansions, reportorial journalism, the object is different. One can be curious or not, fair-minded or not, intellectually honest in the use of the evidence or not, emphatic or not, imprisoned by a perspective or not. For a reportorial journalist to announce his voting record is to undermine his work. It dishonors the struggle to do it right….
This is silly, of course. Although he claims to be transparent, Lemann issues an argument against the very idea. Besides, as a Harvard-educated son of the South, a man who worked for the Texas Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly and the Washington Monthly and who currently holds down a staff job at the New Yorker and his gig at Columbia, there is no way in hell that Lemann didn't vote for Democrat John Kerry.
And that is precisely Hewitt's point. The very one that flies by Lemann's nose. In trying to get establishment Liberals to admit they have a particularly narrow view of the world, Hewitt is trying to show them -- as reporters and writers at Big Media outlets -- how their points of view shape the news. It's not rocket science, this exercise. It's the Socratic method. And it works. Why do you think it's named after a guy who's been dead for more than 2,000 years?
But there's some reason to be optimistic. Lemann does get the outlines of the movement that Hewitt is shaping:
What Hewitt demonstrates about journalism is that journalism-as-politics is rapidly expanding in size and reach, especially on the conservative side. What he demonstrates about politics is not that the Republicans have a wondrously efficient message machine but that there are a lot of smart and very determined conservatives who are constantly starting new organizations and signing up more converts. And the Democrats aren't going to beat them merely by streamlining the delivery of their message.
I'd say this pretty much sums up the head-in-the-sand approach that many Democrats are taking and good for Lemann for making it.
Unfortunately, this insight isn't linked as well as it should be to the idea that underlies much of what Hewitt and DeFeo are trying to do. It's not that Hewitt is a journalist or a political activist or one pretending to be the other (which is what Lemann seems to suspect). Hewitt is one of an increasing number of journalists who - working on-line - believe that the personal tone ("This is what I think….This is what I see…) is a perfectly acceptable way to write and report. Hewitt is skipping the "reportorial objectivity" because, well, because there are plenty of people out there who can do that. And he's using his beliefs and his point of view to poke weaknesses in the supposed objectivity of others.
This strikes traditional journalists like Lemann as a bad idea. But that very point of view, of course, is constricted by their own myopia about their relationships with the economic and political power structure in the U.S. How myopic? Lemann is a writer for magazines that have a long history of Liberal activism and Liberal politicking in this country. Yet he heads -- while he works for one of those magazine -- a school that's supposed to teach journalistic independence and integrity. How, the Hugh Hewitts of the world might ask, is that contradiction resolved? Their answer: It isn't. It is acceptable to the establishment because it is the establishment point of view.
I'm not making a big deal about Lemann's voting or work record to embarrass him or because I disagree with his politics (I don't) or want to diss his work history (ditto). I'm trying to point out that he is, he was and he always will be part of that group of folks who, for better or worse, are seen as the people who are running this country and its institutions. And there are plenty of people -- like Hewitt -- who disagree with the way folks like Lemann see the world and they feel powerless to do anything about it. That's Hewitt's point. And, dammit, it's a good one.
delicious
digg
technorati
Liberal activism and liberal politicking?
While the Texas Monthly has a fine liberal tradition, or so I am told, this longtime reader of The Atlantic and the New Yorker is quite surprised to learn of those magazines' long histories of liberal activism.
Mother Jones? The Nation? Z? The Progressive? Utne Reader? I can think of a lot of liberal-activist magazines, but Lemann's employer ain't one of 'em.
So ... liberal activists run the country and its institutions ... is that how George W. Bush, Denny Hastert, Bill Frist and William Rehnquist became the most powerful men in the country. I'd really like to hear the name of a Texas Monthly reporter who went on to run anything other than late on his bills.
Hugh Hewitt, lawyer, activist, radio host and powerless, powerless pawn in the hands of the liberal establishment. I recommend Hofstadter: http://tinyurl.com/2alvz